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...Tehran ELECTION SHOWDOWN With Iran's presidential election quickly approaching, competition among the four main contenders is heating up. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Moussavi (above) are the current front runners; they face off against Mohsen Rezai, former chief of the Revolutionary Guard, and respected cleric Mehdi Karoubi. On June 3, during a televised presidential debate, reformist candidate Moussavi came out with guns blazing, accusing Ahmadinejad of "undermining" Iran's dignity and criticizing his "mismanagement" of the country's faltering economy. Voting begins on June...
...ruling clerics have used to govern Iran for the last three decades. Khamenei himself is a former President. The job is important enough to have brought millions of Iranians to the polls on Friday, and thousands into the streets afterwards - both supporters of the apparent loser, reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and members of the radical volunteer paramilitary forces who support the reelected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (See pictures of Iran's controversial and violent election...
Still, in addition to his power over domestic and economic policy, the Iranian President is the face for the country abroad. And in that respect, a victory by Mir-Hossein Mousavi would have presented a worst-case scenario for Western efforts to curtail Iran's nuclear program, senior Administration officials said Sunday. He would have presented a softer, less confrontational face to the outside world. And he would have been able to stall even before he entered into negotiations with the excuse of taking all summer to get a new Cabinet and negotiating team in place...
...many mass mobile text messages circulated by the opposition in the tense run-up. "Wouldn't that equally affect Ahmadinejad votes?" asked one confused voter, 19-year-old Farid Shobeiri, who had shown up in Tehran's Vanak Square to show his support for the President's main rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. "Of course they'll only distribute those pens in clearly pro-Mousavi stations in north Tehran," was the matter-of-fact response of Shobeiri's older cousin. (See pictures of Iran's elections...
...before Iran went to the polls, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading reform candidate, agreed to talk to TIME magazine. The interview was held in a building that Mousavi, an architect and artist, designed himself, part of an art school and gallery complex in central Tehran. Mousavi - who is not overwhelmingly charismatic, but seems every bit the artist-intellectual - strolled into a bare conference room, with little security and only a few aides, dressed in a dark suit and blue-striped shirt. He seemed to understand the questions posed in English, but he answered in Farsi...